How to write a legal brief conclusion

If you prefer a visual approach to learning, you may find highlighting to be a very effective tool. Pencil or pen — which is better to use when annotating?

It will be a reference tool when you are drilled by a professor and will be a study aid when you prepare for exams. The goal is to remind yourself of the basic reasoning that the court used to come to its decision and the key factors that made the decision favor one side or the other.

It makes cases, especially the more complicated ones, easy to digest, review and use to extract information. In addition to making it easier to review an original case, annotating cases during the first review of a case makes the briefing process easier.

On the other hand, a brief that is too short will be equally unhelpful because it lacks sufficient information to refresh your memory. Your pencil or pen will be one of your best friends while reading a case.

What are the elements of a brief? You might be wondering why annotating is important if you make an adequate, well-constructed brief. There is usually one main issue on which the court rests its decision. Continue rereading the case until you have identified all the relevant information that you need to make your brief, including the issue sthe facts, the holding, and the relevant parts of the analysis.

Highlighting is a personal tool, and therefore should be used to the extent that highlighting helps, but should be modified in a way that makes it personally time efficient and beneficial.

Try to keep your briefs to one page in length. As you hit these elements or what you think are these elements make a mark in the margins. The process of putting the case into your own words forces you to digest the material, while annotating and highlighting can be accomplished in a much more passive manner.

By their very nature briefs cannot cover everything in a case. In addition, Highlighters are particularly useful in marking off entire sections by using brackets. Even if this were true, what is relevant for the judge to make his decision is not always relevant for you to include in your brief.

Although you might think a pencil might smear more than a pen, with its sharp point a mechanical pencil uses very little excess lead and will not smear as much as you might imagine.

Cases are so dense and full of information that you will find yourself spending considerable amounts of time rereading cases to find what you need.

Elements that you may want to consider including in addition to the four basic elements are: Finally, when you spot a particularly important part of the text, underline it or highlight it as described below.

Whatever elements you decide to include, however, remember that the brief is a tool intended for personal use. Depending on the case, the inclusion of additional elements may be useful. The techniques in the remainder of this section will describe ways to make full use of your highlighters.

If you forget the story, you will not remember how the law in the case was applied.

In addition to these elements, it may help you to organize your thoughts, as some people do, by dividing Facts into separate elements: A brief should be brief! What facts are relevant to include in a brief? The relevant issue or issues, and corresponding conclusions, are the ones for which the court made a final decision and which are binding.Jun 14, · Hey, I have just written a word brief for my year 12 Legal Studies class all the words were in the 'Arguments' section, and now I have to write a word conclusion that doesn't start with 'in conclusion' (or similar) and must follow the following criteria: The conclusion is the final summation of your legal argument with the Status: Resolved.

How To Write a Legal Brief Despite that you should have learned all this in Legal Research & Writing back in law school, here is a brief introduction (or refresher) on brief writing.

Follow the below steps and you’ll draft better briefs. Writing a case brief can be rather easy once you’ve got the format down. While this guide focuses more on the structure of a written brief, you should keep most of the elements when doing a book brief as well. C.

HOW TO BRIEF. The previous section described the parts of a case in order to make it easier to read and identify the pertinent information that you will use to create your briefs.

Sep 02, · Expert Reviewed. How to Write a Legal Brief. Three Parts: Understanding the Facts and Legal Issues Researching the Legal Issues Writing Your Brief Community Q&A A brief is a written argument that a lawyer (or party to a case) submits to a court to persuade that court to rule in favor of his client’s position%().

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